Chalky Swims and Empty Snail Shells

05/11/23

From the car I saw a butterfly. A small white one, a cabbage white perhaps, fluttering down to a dandelion growing in the crack of the pavement. It stayed still for so long I started to wonder if it was a piece of paper, but then it fluttered up again, its wings translucent in the sun, and moved on to another flower. I got out of the car and followed the top of the cliffs round, to where the steps went down to the beach.

The tide was high. Though I knew it was going out, it roared in, crashing against the concrete promenade, all the sand swallowed. I followed the wide grey ridge path at the base of the cliffs. The chalk was tall, marred with both vertical and horizontal lines, the result of a geological phenomenon I have read about but have yet to fully understand. I know, anyway, that this tall ridge of chalk is called the Thanet Anticline, and runs all the way from Margate round to Ramsgate.

At the base of the cliffs there were a few scraggly plants - a type of sea rocket, its yellow flowers bright amongst green leaves, long straw like stalks sticking out from it, dead, and bristling in the wind. There was sea lavender, its flowers dried and pale cream, bristly to the touch. There were other plants too, things I didn’t have names for. On one bush I found snails, clinging on. One at first, then another, then another coming to light as I looked. I watched them, clinging on, cushioned from the breeze by the greenery. A little way along, where the bush ran out, there were shells and twigs and things thrown up by the high tides. I found a spiral shell, marked in bands, and realised it was a snail shell, but thicker, more sea-like than the ones in my garden. I found another, then another. One of them was whiteish, thick like a slipper limpet. I put the three of them in my pocket and walked on.

The water rushed in, spraying up over the edge of the concrete, foaming up the steps that lead down to sand at most times of the tide. When I reached the bay I planned to swim from, there was none of it to be seen. No sand. Only water, rushing, white, hungry. There were a cluster of people sitting outside the small cafe and a man changing out of a wetsuit. I walked on, to the end of the bay, where the concrete ran out in a long ramp. The end of the ramp was surging with water and beyond it, the white cliffs were echoed in the white of the incoming waves.

I changed on the ramp and walked in. I knew this beach, but at the end of the walkway, water already up to my calves, I stumbled on a pile of boulders I didn’t remember. I continued on past, out along the beach beneath the waves. The water was lower than it looked, and I had to wade a way out to be able to swim. The sky was clear and the water was a steely blue. I pushed off and swam away from the promenade, away from the cafe, towards the cliffs at the end of the bay.

The chalk had changed since I was last there. A huge corner had sheared away, leaving the cliff on an angle and the exposed chalk white and clean. I swam toward it, part of the white washing water. The water was clouded with motes of chalk, thick with the legacy of erosion. I swam till I was level with the promontory that sticks out furthest. It would be the last to let go of the high tide. This piece of chalk was slick with green weed, and, as I rounded it, the sun hit me full in the face. The water glittered.

I turned back, waded out though I didn’t want to. As I changed, I found a mermaid’s purse egg sac by my toes, a piece of driftwood that looked like it had been tied in a knot, and half a cuttlefish. A woman stopped to talk, told me that she’d been ill for five months, on bed rest at first, but she just really needed to see the sea. To walk beside it, to hear the sound of the waves. ‘That’s all I needed,’ she said, smiling at me under her bobble hat as I tried to pull my sandy tights on. ‘I just needed to be by the sea.’